Being on a charity pit crew for the Indianapolis 500 Community Day was a fun experience. It was AWESOME! I still don’t know how I was on a media team competing against eleven local media stations. But, I accepted the challenge and tried to win it with the team I was with.

There were two cars were set up in front of the pagoda. Twelve teams of five lined up in front of the cars to be taught now to change a tire on an Indy Car. The teams consisted of two drillers, two tire people, and one driver. The driver was a representative from the charity. In our case, it was Sally Bindley, CEO of School on Wheels. School on Wheels assists school aged children affected by homelessness. SOW tries to keep the children’s education constant during the turmoil of homelessness.

Brian and Lance practicing.

Our goal was simple and broken into four steps

Lug nut off

Tire off

Tire on

Lug on

That’s it. Four simple steps.

The difficult part was the pressure of racing against the clock. During the first heat against a Kokomo radio station, K 92.5, they completed the task first, but didnt completely secure the tire. That mistake earned them a 10 second penalty. Because of that. We won. We were watching the other teams like hawks. Last years winners, the WIBC team made us a little nervous. We were a little excited to see them get knocked out in the first round.

The second heat was pretty straight forward. We raced Indiana Business Journal head to head. We won again

The third heat, against two other teams, was a race against the clock. The first team, WLHK, had some issues getting the lug on and took extra time. We went second and finished in 9.64 seconds. The last team, WJAA, knocked out of the park with a time of 7.64 seconds. We had a small issue with the first tire bumping the new tire. Caleb thought that I was going to throw the tire fifty feet away from the car. Maybe I was a little more intense than usual.

We were a little bummed that we lost but also surprised that we got as far as we did on our first attempt. Sally Bindley was already planning for next year by trying a hire a professional pit crew member. It was a great experience. I started laughing a couple hours after it because I still couldn’t believe that we got to do this.

The funny part was competing against all the tv news people. I have seen all these people on the television and here they were, in front of us. I sensed that they didn’t care for the no name team, us, at first. That feeling turned to hate when we kept winning and yelling.